PY Media Web Portal

Portal Home | History | Redevelopment

WEB PORTAL DEVELOPMENT

Waru.org has expanded. There are a number of new community sites including Kaltukatjara, Aputula (in the Northern Territory), and Kenmore Park (on the Pitjantjatjara Lands). Information has been acquired from other communities including Imanpa, Kanpi and Nyapari. Those communities with ongoing sites will have their information resources developed over the next couple of months. A section with contact information and funding sources has been set-up for the Northern Territory communities and PY Media developing the same for the APY Lands communities.

PY Media has established a working style and layout for the site. All style has been defined using a CSS stylesheet (apart from isolated one-off cases where CSS is used in-line). Site-wide style changes can easily be made once they are in place. The programmer has Designed and built a database, and collected a substantial amount of data from the original waru.org site. Collecting data is an ongoing process. As information continues to be posted by Anangu, it will require monitoring and editing. Text and images have been collected from the old site and have been processed for inclusion in new site. This task is substantially complete.

PHP code to display data and pages about news/bulletin, communities, organisations throughout the website has been written. The page header, navigation panels and footer for all pages are managed by a single PHP script, so again site-wide layout/structural changes can be made once in a central place.

A working 'front end' is substantially in place now (with a few minor adjustments required). The design/style/layout and the database structure will continue to evolve according to the dynamics of the environment. More data and content remain to be incorporated into the system, although the majority of the old content has now been carried over to the new site.

We are currently constructing the site to be used with a 800x600 screen resoloution and style sheets will be added for higher resolutions later. The javascript is already in place to enable these upgrades. Content is managed via the database. Images and slabs of text have been stored outside the database to allow for easy management by non-programmers using normal HTML.

Current and ongoing structural developments include designing 'above the fold' (a newspaper term), meaning that, key information including contact details, navigation and search facilities are present without the need to scroll down the page. (usability) Multiple small, related pages are combined into one larger page where practical allowing easy use and management. The layout is consistent and changed file format of many images allows more efficient loading of pages.

The building of the backend has commenced. This will allow features such as shopping cart, AP Football site with fixtures, scores, ladder, stats, teams, player list Bands page: inc booking/contact details, music downloads, Advertising positions in AP organizations, Calendar of events, linked to communities and organsations.